…about flash gamedev and business

My expectations for 2009

I think that 2009 will bring some movement to the flash game market. Some are good, some are bad.

The quality of flash games is growing. This trend was easily spoted in 2008 and I believe that the bar will keep rising. Portals such as Kongregate and services (or dare I say “The Service”) offered by the Flash Game License crew really pointed many developers the right way: Quality over Quantity.

Although this is good news, it can also be the beginning of the end of money making hobby developers. It was easy to notice that quality developers are becoming full professional game development companies while existing game development companies make their way to the flash market.

What does this mean? Will we have publishers? Thus killing the flash game development risky and yet wonderful game design? Will we have more and more exclusive content to the established portals making the traffic wars less sponsor based and more content based? Will there be any other portal with a view for the midcore market?

Related

I think most Flash developers want the quality over quantity approach ( The good ones that is, not the 13 year old with a cracked copy of Flash reskinning tuts and then getting them sponsored for $20 ), but this has been an argument for years.

Ignoring adver-gaming, which is a totally different species, for the most part the incentive isn’t great enough to really kill yourself making AAA titles.
Aside from very few exceptions ( Mostly sequels of established games ) there still isn’t enough money to warrant going that extra mile.
There’s like a point of diminishing returns, that after a certain amount of effort you’re just pissing your time away as the game won’t recoup that cost.

I know I should be more idealistic and say we make games for the art, for the enjoyment, for the love of the crowd etc. but in real life, once you’ve done your couple of crowd pleasers and you see lots of people are releasing crap and earning from it, you turn to making your hobby earn for you.

Things have got a lot lot better over the years ( I remember when it was just miniclip, shockwave and mousebreaker ) in terms of being able to sell your games, going from the early totally offensive sponsorship amounts ( With sponsorship being wrapped up as a sugar tasting treat for devs, so you would accept <$100. I mean, even sponsorship is just a flowery term for licence ) to where we’re at now, but I still don’t think we’re quite there where you get an indy game getting the same dev. time as a adver or causal game and recouping those costs.

The really big polished productions are still a labour of love, and will be for a time yet.